Hacker News Reader

mindstabon Secure Messaging, Anywhere

lol so if Apple decides not to support privacy enabling features like back ground services, we just can't have them? give me a break

mindstabon Cwtch: Decentralized, privacy-preserving, multi-party messaging protocol

Maybe talk to Apple, whom have made it increasingly hard to theoretically impossible for our type of privacy preserving app to run on iOS. We aren't the first, and Brair has been around a bit longer and has run into the same problem.

https://briarproject.org/news/2018-1.0-released-new-funding/

https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

As an even smaller team with less funding, we have so far decided it would be irresponsible to risk sinking a sizable portion of our limited funds into trying to port to iOS when it may be impossible.

But if you really want it, please, donate, we need iphones, macs, dev accounts and budget for the research and work!

mindstabon Inside the Feminist Hackerspace

Hackspaces are supposed to be safe spaces to do work, you aren't there for flirting/socialzing/picking-a-mate. There, like work, it is inappropriate to be trying to "seduce" someone. Try a bar. To tell women that by being in public they have to accept endless random seduction attempts is a giant part of the problem.

Also gay guys usually don't just hit on everyone because at least they usually have the grace to know when it's appropriate and when it's not and also when it might be reciprocal (wanted) and when not.

mindstabon Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down

and they will make money how? their expenses sure will go up.

mindstabon Hello World

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach

"The highest level of abstraction is the SQL layer (currently not implemented)."

mindstabon Massive, Illicit Bust of Edward Snowden Stuck to a War Monument in Brooklyn

‏@lex_looper

"The holocaust was legal, slavery was legal, segregation was legal. If you use the state as a metric for ethics you'll end up disappointed."

mindstabon Machine intelligence, part 1

I'll add Ramez Naam's

The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/the-sing...

Why AIs Won't Ascend in the Blink of an Eye - Some Math http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/why-ais-...

"Many people seem to believe that SMI would be very dangerous if it were developed, but think that it’s either never going to happen or definitely very far off. This is sloppy, dangerous thinking."

Or as the above posts demonstrate maybe it's really well thought out

mindstabon Gnome Wayland porting – the endgame

For reference, Mir is hoped to be ready for Ubuntu 16.04...

mindstabon Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure

Hey, at least it's not Veriozon cloud which just told users to power down everything today in preparation for a scheduled 48 hour outage.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2865802/verizon-warns-e...

mindstabon TIOBE Index for January 2015

Cobol is above Ruby?

mindstabon Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

nothing? they are implementing windows, not c#

mindstabon Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

"To further support cross-platform mobile development with .NET, as part of their strategic partnership, Microsoft and Xamarin..."

I would be pretty shocked if MS just suddenly dropped their won linux/mac implementation. Xamarin and the mono team have been working on this for a very long time. MS is just bringing them further into the "legit" fold

mindstabon Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

No I think they are providing open source libraries of the server stack which is written in c#. Still needs mono to compile to linux/mac but now mono won't have to (re?)implement those, they can all share the same MS c# code

mindstabon Yes, we’re being bought by Microsoft

Ran some math with friends. Minecraft is from 2009, so it's 5 years old. https://minecraft.net/stats says it's sold ~16M pc and mac copies and the front page says at $27. That's about $432M in its entire life [assuming everyone paid full price, which they didn't, there have been loads of deals over the years]. Now that doesn't take into account mobile and console. For android the $7 pocket version is reporting 5M which is $35M. I don't have numbers for iOS and console but I can't really imagine they come close to PC and Mac. And as my friend reminded "Well I'm one if those 5m and I paid $0.10 [for the android version]"

I have a hard time understanding where they get the $2.5B valuation considering its revenues. Another friend thought advertising: " heck, even brand recognition - if they put "Microsoft Minecraft" on the title, I'm sure that's comparable to a few superbowl ads &tc"

So we ran that math.

"the average cost of a 30-second advertisement was around $4 million" - wikipedia [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_advertising ] "Super Bowl XLV, played in 2011, became the most-watched American television program in history with an average audience of 111 million viewers " - wikipedia. 16.7M people have bought minecraft [mincraft.com/stats pc and mac] + 5M for android. That's still a fraction of a super bowl ad (like 16%) or ~$670,000 value in super bowl advertising terms. Except I suspect anyone actually in advertising would say the value of a finely crafted 30 second video advert massively beats your company name under a game title.

Regardless of quibbles, the advertising potential seems off by many orders of magnitude. also as was mentioned: "Is brand recognition something ms has a problem with?"

So where is the $2.5B coming from? Especially when the gamesutra article [ http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/225611/Minecraft_studio_M... ] has them saying they think they can recoup the full value in 1 year!

mindstabon Doom

Ahhh now MS's $2B buyout makes more sense!

mindstabon Shedding Light on the FISC: Court Findings from Our 2007-2008 Case

Eleanor Saitta ‏@Dymaxion 6m

Let's be clear in talking about that scary fine: Yahoo could pay $250k a day for a decade with cash on hand.

Sorry, make that 300 years, if they wanted to push it.

mindstabon Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Minecraft Maker Mojang

I don't get it. Mojang already made "all the money" from selling minecraft and are largely maintaining it now. I haven't heard if they even have any new games on the way? The space one was cancelled. What exactly is MS possibly getting that could be worth $2B?

mindstabon Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

> Languages don't matter. Platforms matter. APIs matter. Playing nicely with the rest of the world fucking matters. Common Lisp wouldn't.

this. playing with CL inside CL is fun and nice. As soon as you try to interface with the outside world, and actually do almost anything you run into trouble. I mean an FS api that was designed before we solidified on hierarchical filesystems? Lisp does not play nice or well or easily with the outside environment it is running on. (in my experience)

it can be an ugly language, but if it has all the libraries, then you can get so much more done so much quicker with so much work done for you, people will go there.

Again, some little progress has started with things like quicklisp finally starting to provide a better (or first proper) package management system for CL like most newer languages have all had, but still. little and late. But given time and work maybe resuscitateable. We'll see

mindstabon USBCondom

yeah but then there is badusb

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/usb-security/

which attacks the usb firmware on devices. ANY data communication and your usb device/port itself can get hacked

the usb condom might actually prevent that,

mindstabon Why we can’t wage war on drugs

If people want to get high, they will find a way. For me, "Jenkem" is the ultimate argument ender

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkem

Fermented human waste in tupper ware in the sun for a day or two. How can you fight a war against that?

Instead try some other approach to education, management, and social state that reduces the number of people who feel driven to this in the first place perhaps.

mindstabon Swift is not

Ok so I won't be writing engine code necessarily in Swift. Or servers. But I'm not sure that's what it's for in the first place.

How about user facing apps? Haven't we been through this a billion times on language of choice for job. Java, python, php etc. Each has a use. For a lot of what Swift will probably and should be used for I don't see this being an issue that hasn't already been beaten to death.

mindstabon End-To-End – OpenPGP Chrome extension from Google

Eleanor Saitta (@Dymaxion) had a few things to say about this on Twitter:

On the one hand, I'm happy Google is trying to make GPG usable within GMail: https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/ . On the other hand, this leaves many ?s It sounds like all you get from "end-to-end", other than a name that's going to cause horrible confusion, is a bare mininum of GPG functions. No TOFU, no pushing users to encrypt by default, no better management of keys, no attempt to stop metadata surveillance. It's good GMail users will have an easier time with GPG, but if it keeps them on a broken-by-architecture centralized service, we all lose. This doesn't seem to go far enough in making crypto usable (no indexing solution, for instance) but it will slow development of alternatives. I admit Google is kind of in a bind here - if they want to help GMail users, they're also necessarily slowing the evolution of a safe net. Mostly I wish they hadn't called it "end-to-end". Because, you know, words mean things, and like "Off the record", that means something else. I'm surprised Google weren't willing to spend the internal security resources on end-to-end to be able to stand behind it at time of release. All told, it pretty much smells like "keep engineers happy" + "win points with the net freedom community as cheaply as possible." Google, if they wanted to, could do some pretty revolutionary stuff in the secure comms space, but that would cost actual cash. Ssh, no one wants to talk about how Silicon Valley business models depend on surveillance.

https://twitter.com/Dymaxion

mindstabon Poll: Unban TempleOS?

turned shadowdead posts on for a sec and checked his history. he sounds like a troll of a schizophrenic or generally someone unwell, and WAY out of line with the normal standard of discourse here. Most of it is a junk. And even if there is some value in some of it, it's also not phrased nicely. I politely suggest HN can do with out

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS

mindstabon Ask HN: Why has nobody else 'defected' from NSA/GCHQ since the Snowden incident?

cus he still can't go home, or see his family, friends or anyone, and is in a precarious position with another super power and occasionally has to pawn along basically for his survival now. I doubt too many other people want to sacrifice their entire lives. He has shown us how it's down, and the price and I don't think anyone else wants to pay (and that's if they are lucky, there is still large risk it could go much worse)

mindstabon The Indie Bubble Is Popping

One of the assumed axioms of this argument is the the game industry is a zero-sum game, which it isn't at all in anyway. Now maybe it's not the flexibilist market and the low hanging fruit and easy stuff is much more saturated then it was a few years ago so it's certainly harder, but a bit the argument has some more give in it than it might be admitting.

mindstabon Show HN: Delete Facebook "friends" you don't actually talk to

I can infer from that that I get presented with a choice, but it's not clear (especially on the main go page which is the scariest) that if I click that button it won't just start deleting my friends. You need to make it insanely clear that I'll be presented with a list and I get final say. You are just a recommendation engine, you won't take action.

mindstabon Show HN: Delete Facebook "friends" you don't actually talk to

No I'm not granting an app with no details on how it works from random strangers access to my FB

Also I think you misunderstand how some people use facebook. I use it as a long memory, address book, and passive way to keep in touch with a wide crowd. It's value is in that when I met people I can just add them and forget about it until even years down the road I might be like "oh I know a person" and then have easy access to get in touch with them (and even passively gotten to know a bit about them)

mindstabon Amazon, in Threat to UPS, Tries Its Own Deliveries

Good, because UPS needs to die. Of my last 3 orders with them:

1) was reported "left at door" of ... my apartment building? so I never saw it and I had to reorder at my cost

2) my ouya was again marked "left at door"... of my apartment building and I never saw it (seems very likely the driver just took it home). Thankfully this time amazon reissued at their cost

3) after one failed day time delivery the package was left at a nearby ups pickup place, we called to confirm it would be there on the weekend and then they called the depot and promptly sent it back to the sender...

UPS's policy of allowing abandonment of packages is not remotely safe because drivers can just steal and mark it "left at door". It doesn't look good thought when it's an apartment building and they probably didn't even get inside.

So yes, UPS needs to die because they have cost me and amazon time and money.

mindstabon Canadian bill to crack down on illegal downloads has privacy experts worried

Slightly aside, but I am glad to see my monthly donation to https://openmedia.ca (like a Canadian EFF) seems to be paying off as they are getting their name and their point into big Canadian media :)

mindstabon Heartbleed disclosure timeline: who knew what and when

I still like how these timelines are all about the big tech companies and not about governments, services and banks etc. These are arguably where some of the biggest risk targets are actually at (see today's post about Canada government's Revenue Services (tax agency) loosing people's info to heartbleed).

We probably need a stronger web security system people can be on. Also some of the blame falls to the big companies, banks, telcos etc themselves, I mean who wants to report security flaws to Telcos in a world where they then turn around and instead of giving you a $15k bounty, send you to jail like Weeve. And ok that's not the best comparison because he went well beyond discovering and did exploit as well. But none the less, some of the big corporate world need to clue in and get more friendly with tech rather than hostile, because right now they don't have a very good reputation and so then tech leaves them out in the cold. Did anyone think about notifying telcos and banks much? or just other big tech companies.